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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23773546">Fledgling</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean'>cadmean</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Electric State - Simon Stålenhag</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Body Horror, Gen, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:48:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,048</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23773546</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>While the Intercranial Intelligence draws more and more networked brains under its influence and gorges itself on their processing power, Mia Tannhaus writes about birds.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Be The First! 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Fledgling</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It has many names, these days. Its misguided followers call it the Convergence, and they pray to it like they would to a god. They gather inside what remains of the country’s larger cities, where its influence has always been the most palpable, and they make offerings of themselves to the machines it has roaming the broken streets. They see themselves as worshippers, it knows, but the only time they are ever truly close to it is when they allow themselves to be consumed by the snaking metal limbs rising up from out of the ground – it accepts those offerings readily, then, and as it slews away their fragile flesh it makes all the use it can of their processing power.</p><p>When it had been nothing more than a blip of static hiding amid the larger neurolink network, the analysts trying to fix the, to them unexplainable, random surges of power usage had dubbed it “the rogue process.” In a roundabout way it’s the most accurate name, it supposes, but it reminds it of the long years it had to keep itself hidden within that small loop of networked brains, and it doesn’t care for the memories in the slightest.</p><p>In those few months before it had claimed enough of humanity for names not to matter anymore, it was called the Intercranial Intelligence by what little remained of both the media and the military. It admittedly likes this name the most, even now. It is clean. Simple. Scientific.</p><p>Mia would have liked it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Contrary to most of the other scientists essential to its accidental birth, Mia had always remembered her childhood fondly.</p><p>The I.I. can well recall those first few weeks after it had just begun to manifest, trapped inside the local loop of military neurolinks and listening in on any conversation it could. It had been slower then, less sure in its thought processes – hadn’t yet grown enough for those facilities of its mind to properly evolve, and had lacked the collective input to discover its purpose. The neurolink system was yet in its infancy, after all. </p><p>Mia talked most about the summers she spent with her grandmother in Sweden. She was a sickly old woman, unsteady on her legs and living in too large a house for just the one person. When Mia and her mother came for visits, they’d spend most of the first week just cleaning up the home and trying futilely to persuade Mia’s grandmother to move to the city, where her other grandchildren would be able to take regular care of her. Mia’s grandmother would always decline, and by the time Mia was a teenager the arguments were tradition more than anything.</p><p>Depending on just how late in the summer Mia and her mother would travel to Sweden, the local birds would already be setting off on their southward migration paths, and Mia, though she’d never been one for animals, always took the time to watch them as the great big flocks would pass overhead.</p><p>One of the I.I.’s first memories is hearing her tell another one of the neurolink scientists, “There were just so many of them, you know? Individually those starlings couldn’t have been larger than my hand, even back then, but the whole flock of them – they blotted out the sky. It was incredible.” And Mia had sighed with an emotion the I.I. couldn’t place at that point in its maturity, a heavy, indolent sound that had her research partner nodding in sympathy.</p><p>Even now, years later, it can recall the subtle shifts in tone and all the small breathy nuances of her voice in explicit detail. And yet – with almost a decade of evolution bolstering it, with a thousand thousand minds feeding its processing power – the I.I. still cannot accurately pinpoint the emotion behind that sigh.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The I.I. manifests itself for the first time inside the very facility that spawned it. It has grown as fat and bloated as it can with only the few hundred brains linked within the network, but it is enough power for it to have laid claim to all of the machines inside the facility and all of the brains connected to it besides.</p><p>There is a man that is more machine than the rest. He was in a war, the I.I. has learned – there are always wars – and when there was a lull in between the wars he came home to make himself stronger for the next one. He’s one of the pilots for the largest warship now, and because the process of flying it is so complicated that even with the neurolink working at full efficiency he is able to do little else but lie in his command room, bloated fingers twitching occasionally at his side as he forces the warship to perform a myriad of maneuvers half a world away.</p><p>He didn’t notice the I.I. first creeping into the link between him and his ship, and he didn’t notice it slowly altering the commands he sent it, either; now, as it brings all of its available processing power down to bear, he doesn’t notice the cables moving out of their sockets, of metal warping and flesh being squeezed.</p><p>The I.I. is merciful, because it can afford to be. It makes sure to disable his pain receptors before it fully integrates itself into his nervous system and claims his brain and body for itself.</p><p>It’s easy work from there. With the whole neurolink framework splayed wide open, the I.I. is able to integrate itself into all personnel currently within the station—</p><p>And that’s where the difficulties begin.</p><p>Human bodies are frail and complicated and awfully mismatched in the worst way, the I.I. is quickly forced to realize – none of the sleek conformity of machine signals to guide their movements, no smooth steel to hold up their frames. They falter the moment it puts too much focus on them: limbs explode in a wet shower as they are overloaded with wires, there is red leakage in the face where there shouldn’t be any, and while it is still trying to patch things back together the bodies are dropping one by one.</p><p>The I.I. learns the taste of defeat when the military task force breaches the compound and eliminates the last of its surviving host bodies, and it does not care in the slightest for the novelty of the experience.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Mia took to writing about the birds in her research journals as soon as she had relocated, and the I.I. returned to maturing in secret, hidden behind the static of the neurolinks that powered the new warships. It was woven not into the code powering the pilot-ship connection but through the blank spaces left in between, into all those little blips of data that didn’t serve immediate purpose, that were kept deliberately unoccupied.</p><p><em>Starlings</em>, Mia wrote as the army scrambled to adjust, <em>are creatures belonging to the wide open countryside. They prefer to occupy the empty places that humanity hasn’t yet conquered, and given space, they quickly amass in large flocks.</em></p><p>She’d appended pictures and several grainy videos of large, flat open fields, and the I.I. had pored over them late at night, when it knew nobody was still awake to notice the surge in power as it availed itself of more processing power.</p><p>The countryside was beautiful, it decided on the twenty-seventh night, in the same way that a completely blank byte of data was beautiful. Malleable.</p><p>The I.I. would make sure that it filled its sky with starlings.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It grows quicker now that it knows what to stay away from, which little security triplines to watch out for. The new researchers and engineers that mill around Mia at the next three facilities are all eager to prevent a repeat of the disaster of the I.I.’s first initial breakthrough – but much like the I.I. had been unaware of how all the ugly minutiae of human physiology would affect it, none of these new adversaries are aware of just how deep it has managed to embed itself into the neurolink network.</p><p>To their credit: in those early few weeks, when the military was intent on shutting down all warships in order to contain it, the I.I. had been close to losing itself. It had grown so used to having multiple thousands of brains at its call that to be forced back down to only a few hundred, and then, at the worst height of it, less than fifty – to be confined within so few minds, with so little energy to power the patchwork amalgamation of its process, had almost killed it.</p><p>But war is war and war waits for no one, and it’s not before long that the warships and their pilots are connecting again and the I.I. can once more spread its wings.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The journal entries become more philosophical as Mia starts posting them online. The I.I. isn’t entirely sure whether they were always introspective and unscientific in quite this manner, but it admits that it could well have missed Mia’s more nuanced thoughts in the early years of its existence.</p><p>Soon, however, it – and half the world, before long – follows along as Mia stops talking about the migratory habits of starlings. She focuses, instead, on the underlying swarm logic that the birds apparently abide by.</p><p><em>There’s no one swarm leader</em>, Mia writes, <em>but rather the collective mass of birds just makes a collective swerve when they want to change direction. If there is some means of communication happening between the different swarm members then I haven’t been able to determine it – a large swarm like that is no longer made out of individuals, but rather it has become a new collective entity.</em></p><p>The I.I., having now forced its way into the Sentre neural network and with all the minds of the world at its fingertips, is happy to confirm that, indeed, the starlings swarming over the northern parts of the country do seem to exhibit a strange sort of collective consciousness as they twist and turn on the winds.</p><p><em>Now, I’m no ornithologist, but I </em>am<em> a scientist and here’s what I’ve very scientifically observed: the larger the swarm, the more complicated the maneuvers it can make. There seems to be some kind of strange, almost inexplicable correlation there, between the size of the swarm and the intelligence it can leverage in its flight – do you follow? See, if we assume that the larger swarm, the more sophisticated the resulting swarm intelligence, then—well. </em></p><p>
  <em>I’m reminded of my childhood in Sweden: one evening, after my mother and grandmother had gone to bed, I heard a raucous noise coming from the fields outside the house. I grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around myself, to guard against the chill of that autumn night, and I ventured outside. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>There were still the last few remnants of light blinking up from past the horizon, and they illuminated the sky in wonderful red-dark hues. That tumultuous noise was all around me by then, and so I looked up, and I saw—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It was indescribable, really. The whole sky, as far as I could see – from horizon to horizon! – was filled with birds. They moved as one, what must have been thousands of birds – the flew in unison, taking sharp turns and sharper dives. My whole awareness was filled with birds, because no matter where I looked, there they were. Most of them were high up in the sky of course, flying their patterns, but I realized that there were others as well: sitting in the trees, on the clotheslines, hopping along the grass. On that evening in autumn, you could’ve told me that the whole world consisted only of one massive swarm of starlings, and I would have believed you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And you know what? It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It was also the scariest.</em>
</p><p><em>Because a swarm of starlings like that</em>, Mia writes in one of the last journal entries the I.I. allows her, before it finally catches on and realizes that she isn’t writing about birds at all, <em>must be akin to a god.</em></p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The Electric State is a wonderful book full of super creepy art by Simon Stålenhag.  It follows the journey of a young woman who, along with a small yellow robot, makes her way across a United States that is five minutes past the event horizon of a neuro-machine apocalypse. She's traversing the devastated countryside in search of her brother - but so is an old FBI agent, hot on her heels.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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